Passwod problems

A friend took an old computer out of moth balls and asked me if I could update it and do a little tune up. Any important data had already been transferred to another computer, and this was only to be used occasionally, if that. The update (WinXP sp2) went slow, (old machine with very little memory (256mb) and satellite internet access), but no problems. To try to gain a little optimization I installed "Tool Whiz Pro", which seemed to help. It always worked pretty well on my machine so, hey what could go wrong. A little faster but still slow by today's standards, and stable with no apparent problems. Then for some unknown reason she decided to uninstall the Tool Whiz software. Although she did it correctly from the Control Panel, now she can't get back in to Windows because it keeps asking for a password she never had.
I have tried F8 boot to safe mode. No luck, still wants a password that doesn't exist. Sometimes it gives both options of either her name or the administrator, but she doesn't recall ever having a password. While I was working on it, it never asked for a password, and she had never been ask either. Now since uninstalling Tool Whiz, it wants a password.
Besides buying a dozen different programs that promise to unlock the box, would anyone happen to know a not too techie way of getting back in?
If it's too costly or too complicated, it's going back in the closet.
Thanks
UPDATE: she informed me that she may have had a password when she had Win98 installed, but not after WinXP was installed, if that would make a difference.

You don't need to buy a password recovery program. The one that always works for me on PCs or servers - although you have to follow it carefully - is Offline password recovery. This will allow you to remove the administrator password, then you can login with the user name "administrator" and leave the password field blank.

The Following User Says Thank You to Paul T For This Useful Post:

Hi Paul,
Since I gave up and gave it back to her, she took it to a local shop to see what he could do. Apparently, I am told, he has the hard drive on the bench and is having problems getting in as well. I will give her this info you provided and perhaps she can pass it along to him. Now that I think about it, I did come across this site you referenced while I was researching this problem, but she or I didn't have a CD or USB drive to boot with, which apparently is required. So I think we still would have been out of luck.
I would assume this guy would have all the tools you might need to do this sort of thing, but maybe not. This machine may be retired back to the closet after all!
Thanks for your time and advise, weather it gets used or not remains to be seen. It is appreciated nonetheless. newdeal
It's all coming back to me. For what it's worth, I did manage to get into set-up and cleared the password there, but I don't think that did anything because I still couldn't log into windows once I rebooted.

You probably reset the BIOS password, which is not the Windows password.
You need a CD to boot from to be able to run any password recovery tools. Once Windows is running you cannot do anything until you log in.

This problem has been out of my hands for a while now but thanks for the tip. I did happen to ask just recently if or what ever became of it and it seems it remains a mystery and is still on the bench, or maybe more appropriately, under the bench! My friend gave up and bought a second hand notebook for backup and occasional email when out of town. For her, life is good again. Thanks again, newdeal